The White Doe of Rylstone

The White Doe of Rylstone; or, The Fate of the Nortons is a long narrative poem by William Wordsworth, written initially in 1807–08, but not finally revised and published until 1815.

The poem then moves back in time to Emily Norton at Rylstone Hall; at her father's command she embroiders a banner for his followers, who are to rise in rebellion.

Wordsworth found in Thomas Whitaker's The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven the legend of a white doe which, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, continued to make a weekly pilgrimage from Rylstone to Bolton Abbey.

[1] The historical parts of the story of The White Doe are taken from a ballad called "The Rising in the North", which Wordsworth had read in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and also from Nicolson and Burn's The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland.

[16] Coleridge, by then in a state of uneasy reconciliation with Wordsworth, quoted a passage from The White Doe in his Biographia Literaria, praising its beauty and imaginative power.

[17][18] John Ruskin, in a private letter, compared it favourably with Coleridge's Christabel, calling it "a poem of equal grace and imagination, but how pure, how just, how chaste in its truth, how high in its end".

His wry comment was that "The White Doe is one of those poems which make many readers inclined to feel a certain tenderness for Jeffrey's rugged insensibility; and I confess that I am not one of its warm admirers".

[20] In the 20th century the critic Alice Comparetti and the poet Donald Davie were agreed in finding in The White Doe the melancholy of Thomson, Gray and Milton.